The rather lucky Taiwanese team of Tom's Hardware got their hands on an Intel Bloomfield engineering sample that has a clock-speed of 2.93 GHz, running on a Intel X58 chipset based motherboard made by Foxconn called Renaissance to evaluate a Gainward Radeon HD4850 sample. System details are provided below.

Of course, the benchmark lacks the advantage NVIDIA PhysX gives to the CPU score in 3DMark Vantage, but for a CPU alone, it is a more than decent score. The system secured P7182 at default settings with a CPU score of 17966. In 3DMark06, it churned out 12786 3DMarks with a CPU score of 5183. In the Crysis CPU benchmark, scores of 33.70 and 18.29 were recorded at 1280x1024 resolution with no anti-aliasing.

Nice results, but is it getting more punch out of the 4850? In fact, not really sure what this has to do with a 4850 at all. Could you put into the title and say the same thing?

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The fact that it's bringing out good CPU scores that affect this bench, and that this is perhaps one of the first published benchmarks of a video-card on a Nehalem derivative causes me to use that. So you get a glimpse of how Nehalem affects a HD4850 bench versus other benches using other CPU's that are all over the internet.

Another reason why 'HD4850' was used in the title was to show there's no latest NVIDIA card that could affect CPU score and that there are pure CPU scores in the benchmark.

Sure I have 8 actual cores, though a lower clock, crap memory bandwidth and an inferior architecture.
Harpertowns at the same clock would perform a lot better. ie current generation can keep up easily.

Sure I have 8 actual cores, though a lower clock, crap memory bandwidth and an inferior architecture.
Harpertowns at the same clock would perform a lot better. ie current generation can keep up easily.

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We're still a ways away from it's release, and I believe these boards are still very new. It will likely speed up a decent amount before it's release.

Looks like we are seeing diminishing returns. I would have expected a higher score. This is an 8 core cpu right?

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No, it's a 4-core cpu w/ hyper-threading, giving it 8 logical cores in window's. I'm not sure what the difference is performance-wise, but I feel like 8 logical cores is probably not the same as 8 real cores.

No, it's a 4-core cpu w/ hyper-threading, giving it 8 logical cores in window's. I'm not sure what the difference is performance-wise, but I feel like 8 logical cores is probably not the same as 8 real cores.

It would, really when you think about it, not only is the board and cpu not fully developed, but windows and vantage may be just warming up to the tech new. So many things working together, at this stage in the game I think those scores are just based on raw architecture power, and seem pretty nice.

It would, really when you think about it, not only is the board and cpu not fully developed, but windows and vantage may be just warming up to the tech new. So many things working together, at this stage in the game I think those scores are just based on raw architecture power, and seem pretty nice.

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Lets see what develops this time. HT has always been a nice feature, even during the P4 days but it was never really utilized to it's full potential. If we see better support from the OS (Win7), games and other apps things will get very interesting indeed.

what socket will N use 775 and if so will it only be for ddr3 based boards?

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No they got a whole new socket, and the architecture of the chipset has a ddr3 memory controller built in eliminating the fsb, so I'm assuming it's ddr3 exclusive. There was talk at one point of some of the lower models being compatible w/ 775, but that won't be till next year if at all. I don't see how it could w/ the way it operates though. Totally different way of clocking.

The rather lucky Taiwanese team of Tom's Hardware got their hands on an Intel Bloomfield engineering sample that has a clock-speed of 2.93 GHz, running on a Intel X58 chipset based motherboard made by Foxconn called Renaissance to evaluate a Gainward Radeon HD4850 sample. System details are provided below.

Of course, the benchmark lacks the advantage NVIDIA PhysX gives to the CPU score in 3DMark Vantage, but for a CPU alone, it is a more than decent score. The system secured P7182 at default settings with a CPU score of 17966. In 3DMark06, it churned out 12786 3DMarks with a CPU score of 5183. In the Crysis CPU benchmark, scores of 33.70 and 18.29 were recorded at 1280x1024 resolution with no anti-aliasing.

Looks like we are seeing diminishing returns. I would have expected a higher score. The Nehalem 2.93GHz is an 8 core cpu right?

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Don't forget that the Renaissance\X58 is still in it's infancy, so the BIOS is most likely really immature and hindering the performance of both the CPU and therefore bringing the 4850 down. Could explain why they're running in Dual Channel and not Tri-Channel. So, for an early, initial look at a Nehalem it's pretty promising really. I would really like to see them repeat this test once Foxconn give them a BIOS update, I expect we'd see pretty different results.

As for the 2.93GHz Bloomfield, I thought that this chip was only a quad-core but would handle 8-threads.